Saturday, 31 May 2014

Rough Notes - Publish once cleaned upProblem: Content Types are a misunderstood and often underutilised set of functionality for syndicating metadata. Management of the syndication's and ramifications of decisions often lead to unpleasant scenarios.

Notes: Not a lot has changed between SP2010 and SP2013.

General if you need to reuse a content type in more than 1 site collection it is a good candidate to go into the content type hub.

It is a good idea to ensure that each DTAP environment has identical Content Types in the Content Type Hub. Concept Search has a product that synchronises Content type across env. So changes made in production can be pushed to pre-production and then onto your UAT environment. Writing code to do this is fairly simple.

Concept Search is a third party solution designed to auto-classify content that’s dependent on metadata in the MMS Term Stores.

If is a good idea to have a service owner for Content Type across the enterprise, as this role is very closely related to the Taxonomy/Term store, it is a good idea for this service owner to manage both of the MMS relevant functions.

A good break down is to work out what the required columns on all data is and this improves search considerable. For example all document should have a country. This could be a Term Set with Global, regions (e.g. EMIA), countries (e.g. United Kingdom) and provinces/states (e.g. ) allow each document to be tagged to a country.

I like to group Global Content Types into 2 or 3 layer namely (Enterprise CT's, Division Specific CT's and application specific CT's). The CT's created in any of these layers inherit from the layer above. For example, all our documents have an additional field country that applies to all documents (Enterprise global CT), at a division Marketing (A marketing medium media e.g. Newspaper) is appended. Lastly in our contrived example we have built a specific application for tracking our marketing and this would add the fields (product Type, Audience age range) shall be added. This allows for consistent tagging/metadata of data within an enterprise.

A good example of search working with meta data is not on the enterprise search you can add a filter on country and allow folks to easily filter down to country specific documents quickly.